Meth making in CNY's rural area booming with "shake-and-bake method"

View full sizeDavid Lassman / The Post-StandardMethamphetamine making supplies including soda bottle, gloves, batteries, cold medicine and other items at the State Police barracks in N. Syracuse.

A Madison County sheriff’s deputy driving down rural Ditch Bank Road last month spotted a 2-liter soda bottle on the side of the road. The bottle was wrapped with silver duct tape, and two plastic hoses poked out from the top. Inside was a clear liquid.

The deputy knew right away what it was: supplies for the highly toxic and potentially explosive process of manufacturing, or cooking, the drug methamphetamine.

“They were probably cooking it in cars as they drove along,” said Madison County Sheriff Allen Riley.

Police and prosecutors in rural areas of Central New York are seeing a boom in a small-scale meth-making done in soda bottles. Using the “shake-and-bake method,” meth cookers can produce hundreds of dollars’ worth of the drug in an hour in the backyard, the woods or a car.

In the past three years, more than 30 labs, mostly shake-and-bake, have been found in Madison, Oneida and Oswego counties, according to the state police unit that investigates meth labs. None were discovered in Onondaga County.

“It’s primarily a rural problem,” said Patrick DiPirro, an investigator with the response team. “The further away from big cities you get, the more you see meth labs.”

The pace is accelerating. Last year, DiPirro said, 44 labs were found statewide. In the first three months of 2012, police found 26. Of those, 23 were shake-and-bake operations.

“If we keep going on the pace we’re going right now, we’re going to have a record year,” said Mike Burgess, an investigator for the Oneida city police.

What police are seeing are not the gleaming, high-production labs like the one in the popular television series “Breaking Bad.” The shake-and-bake method, also called one-pot, has made methamphetamine easier to make and has increased the danger of explosions. When the ingredients — which include lithium batteries and camping-stove fuel — are mixed together to generate meth, the chemical reactions inside the bottle can race out of control.

“One-pots can still be incredibly toxic and volatile,” said Gregory Oakes, the Oswego County district attorney. “Imagine someone traveling around with this, and all of the sudden there’s a rear-end collision and that ignites. You’re going to have the explosive nature of that and the vehicle gas.”

A house in Camden was damaged by smoke and flames in February 2011, which the fire chief blamed on a chemical explosion of meth-making supplies. That was the third fire at that house in as many months.

“Even though it’s a 1- or 2-liter bottle, there’s enough fuel to take down a house,” said Jackie Long, a former California police officer who now trains local police officers for the federal Department of Homeland Security.

Police say they’re finding shake-and-bake bottles not just on roadsides, but in woods and business parks. When asked by police in June where he made the drug, according to court records, Oneida resident Michael Held Jr. said: “Um, all over. Never the same place twice.”

Held pleaded guilty to possession of meth-making supplies and was sentenced to six months in jail.

The shake-and-bake process is so much easier than traditional meth labs that some cookers will make multiple bottles at once. In a case in Oneida in August, investigators found a dozen shake-and-bake bottles in a home on Lenox Avenue.

The purity and potency of the meth depends on the skill of the cooker. A proficient meth maker can produce 3 grams of methamphetamine from a single pack of cold medicine, Long said. Cut with inert ingredients, that can yield 12 grams of street-level meth that sells for $100 a gram, he said.

Meth cookers prefer the shake-and-bake method not just because it’s easier to create the drug, but also because it’s easier to escape detection.

“Years ago, three or four different people would have part of the meth, and it would take three to four hours to make,” DiPirro said. “Now you can put it all in a bottle, drive around with it and come back in an hour.”

Most of the supplies for cooking meth are easy to find at stores. The hardest ingredient for meth cookers to obtain is pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in many allergy medicines and an essential component of meth. Federal law limits purchases per person to 3.6 grams in one day and to 9 grams in 30 days.

A box of cold medicine can contain up to 3.6 grams. With every purchase, the customer has to show a photo identification, and the store is required to keep a record of the purchase.

Meth cookers get around those restrictions by employing family, friends and users to drive from drugstore to drugstore buying allergy medicine. Police call those buyers “smurfers,” after the blue cartoon characters called Smurfs who worked in teams.

A meth dealer in Camden recruited smurfers by getting them hooked on free meth and then requiring them to work for him, according to court papers.

Michael Held, the Oneida man who pleaded guilty to possessing meth-making supplies, even had his father buy some cold medicine. Michael Held Sr., also of Oneida, said he bought “a box about once a month to shut him up,” according to his statement in Oneida City Court.

Last month, a Canastota woman pleaded guilty to buying allergy medicine at least 39 times in the first six months of 2011. Melissa Dager said in federal court papers she bought a total of 99 grams — about double the legal limit — for her brother, Robert Atkinson, also of Canastota, to make methamphetamine. Atkinson has pleaded not guilty.

Meth has become so prevalent in Madison County, Riley said, that his office is training employees in other county departments whose jobs might put them in contact with labs or supplies: social workers, public-health nurses and even highway workers.